One long and bloody night is finally at its end in Rogues’ Gallery #4, with story by Hannah Rose May and Declan Shalvey, written by May, drawn by Justin Mason, colored by Triona Farrell, lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou and published by Image.
Roy is getting closer to his final destination. And perhaps nearer to a certain red planet in Traveling to Mars #3, written by Mark Russell, drawn by Roberto “Dakar” Meli, colored by Chiara Di Francia, lettered by Mattia Gentili and published by Ablaze.
When you get the boot from your superhero team and you have to go back home, it kinda sucks. It sucks worse when someone turns up dead in Local Man #1, written by Tim Seeley and Tony Fleecs, drawn by Fleecs and Seeley, colored by Brad Simpson and Felipe Sobreiro, lettered by Comicraft and published by Image.
You could say the neighborhood’s gone to Hell … but it was always meant for monsters in Where Monsters Lie #1, written by Kyle Starks, drawn by Piotr Kowalski, colored by Vladimir Popov, lettered by Joshua Reed and published by Dark Horse.
Will Nevin: After saying we’d do more of these, we wound up taking another, even-more-extended break. But, hey, at least the site went down with us. I’d like to think it’s the tech backside embracing our work ethic.
Ian Gregory: As above, so below, Will.
Will: Comics have certainly not stopped — not even for one damned minute — so we have an incredible backlog of stuff to get to, which means I’m taking the extraordinary step of going to *four* books this time. Mostly because we did three in a particularly bad series (what’s the sunk cost fallacy, anyway?) but at least partly to help us get up to speed … at some indefinite point in the future.
Ian: This is just the price of inflation. It used to be you only needed three books to get a good column, but desperate times and all that. I’m sure we can blame this on Biden, somehow.
Will: Thanks, Joe Brandon.
Rogues’ Gallery #4: Finally, It’s Over
Will: Again, I’m sorry. Really. Probably. But I felt an obligation to do this because we covered the other three … yet, there’s just nothing here. It looks *great* — nothing to quibble with on the art side, especially with the bloodshed and accompanying visuals in this finale — but the story here is as confused and empty as it ever was.
This issue is supposed to have stakes, supposed to have meaning. But the climax is a television superhero actress — who just saw her partner get murdered! — taking time to don her costume to do battle with home invaders. Blech. There was a good idea in this series at some point, but it’s hidden under a ton of bad, clunky shit by the time we get to the end.
Ian: First, yes, it’s as you say. Justin Mason on line art, Triona Farrell on colors and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou on letters. I think these three are really excellent in this book. I love the ominous dark shadows of the mansion, highlighted by bursts of blood. I love the super-dramatic angles, as the characters are drawn from above or below, that give the book a great sense of urgency. I like Hass’ letters, and the sound effects that blend into the background. Visually, this book is a lot of fun.
Will: *indistinct grumbling at Otsmane-Elhaou’s lettering*
Ian: I actually like that Maisie puts on the costume during this fight. It sets up this interesting bit of theming: She’s being attacked for insufficiently portraying Red Rogue to these nerds’ preferences, so she literally becomes Red Rogue to defeat them. It’s clever, and it would work better if it didn’t happen a) literally 10 pages before the end of the series and b) if her husband hadn’t just died in her arms two pages beforehand.
You’re right that it’s odd, and I think it could have worked if he had died, say, in issue #2 and she put the costume on at the end of issue #3 (thereby setting up an entire closing issue of revenge-killing). As it is now, it just feels like every other plot beat in this story: rushed.
Will: The end itself, the last page as we linger with the now-incarcerated ringleader seemingly still deep into his obsession with actress Maisie Wade, was fairly unsatisfying — I think because it so encapsulated the unbelievability of this series.
Ian: She’s pregnant?! What a cheap way to bring things to a close. I like that it ends with everyone loving her (the fickleness of the public, that her work is only appreciated after a great tragedy, and people only really love her for the violence in her home and not her art), but it does come out of nowhere and it feels just as unearned as everything else in this book.
Traveling to Mars #3: Maybe This Trip Is Slowing Down
Will: We stuck with a bad book, so it should be no surprise that we’re continuing with something legitimately excellent in Traveling to Mars. The series is quite decompressed — I have no real sense that we’re that much closer to our destination — but we’ve learned so much about Roy, mostly his regrets and how he’s bonding with his robot companions. The narration might come off a little try-hard in spots, but I still love how Russell has nailed this man’s voice.
Ian: I was actually a little disappointed in this issue. I feel like we’ve gotten away from Roy as a person, even given flashbacks to his past, and have gotten caught up in wider commentaries about human civilization, fame and evopsych. I felt that, at times, it was Russell’s voice narrating the issue and not our character’s. In the past, that sense of obviousness has bothered me about Russell’s writing, and I was disappointed to feel it here after how strongly the first couple issues were attached to Roy and his perspective.
Will: This issue has a lot to say on memory, both on interpersonal and societal levels. The memories we choose to keep as individuals and as a civilization. We see Roy at his happiest in this flashback where he’s taking his future ex to meet his parents for the first time, but I imagine we’ll soon see what drove them apart. That’s gonna be rough.
Ian: By the way, for all this beef company claims to be taking care of Roy, they sure sprung for about the absolute worst psychologist they could find, huh? I’m not so sure that, if you’re talking to a dying man on a one-way-trip to Mars, you should tell him that what he’s doing won’t really matter, and then go off on some tangent about aliens. Just bizarre stuff. I do look forward to more information about his ex, mainly because I think Roy’s life story is interesting in its boringness, and to see how she affects his feelings toward the journey.
Will: I know I keep asking you for predictions about this series, but it’s because I’m genuinely curious — I feel like we could go any number of directions from here, whether that’s deepening the bond between Roy and his robot companions or Roy deciding to scuttle the whole damned mission.
Ian: It seems to me that having Roy talk to his ex-wife likely won’t have the psychologically stabilizing effect they are anticipating. I’m still leaning on my adopting-the-robots theory, but I’m hoping that it goes somewhere even more complicated and nuanced. Where that might be, however, I don’t know.
Local Man #1: RIP, Hodag, One Love, Gone But Not Forgotten
Will: And now we get to the first of two new (to us) books. First, I have to say the “Image flip book” style does not translate well to digital, at least not how this book was produced on ComiXology, because it was confusing as hell to read the backup and not understand anything going on only to eventually realize I was reading it backward. Not gonna get that 10 minutes of my time back. Alas.
Anyway, it seems like said backup and said superhero universe capture the spirit of ’90s X-Men quite well.
Ian: You know I’m pretty keyed into Liefeld stuff, for better or for worse. One could even say I’ve predicated my (dubious) critical career on it. So, yeah, this tickled me. I like the stark contrast between this sequence and the down-to-earth nature of the main story. Did this happen, in-universe, or was this a comic that people read? Given how litigation-happy his team seems to be, I’m guessing the latter.
Will: That’s not the main thrust of this series, of course, because what would be the point of putting the goddamned best stuff in the backups? No, this is the story of a disgraced (for lack of a better term) X-man returning home, head in hand, to pick up some kind of life, only for a dopey rival to turn up murdered. Interesting premise if nothing else.
Ian: I’m not opposed to it. I’ll get into my complaints with the premise later, but I like the core concept and there’s definitely a hook for the second issue. Functionally, this is a well-written and well-illustrated comic, and on a craft level I don’t really have any complaints. I like Tony Fleecs’ art, and I like the soft coloring (and how well it contrasts with the ’90s flashback). Big Hodag fan over here. RIP.
Will: Crossjack’s sin seems to perhaps have been on the teammate fuckin’ order of things, but it was apparently bad enough for the whole damned world to know. Maybe he futzed up a mission real bad in addition to extracurricular misbehavior. Do you care to find out more?
Ian: To be honest, not really. Everyone seems really pissed at him — his parents, randos in a truck, randos in the bar. It’s a little over the top. Of the two people he actually gets to have a productive conversation with (that isn’t just them verbally kicking him over and over), one of them is poor Hodag, who just wants to hang out. I think if you’re going to have everyone hate your protagonist this much, and I mean seriously this is a lot of hate to the point that no one is even willing to just ignore the guy, then you owe the reader at least some kind of explanation. At this point, I have a hard time believing that whatever he did was so catastrophic it basically made everyone on the planet hate him.
Hey, also! How does his old superteam know that he used a “shield-like object” against Hodag? Did they seriously drop everything to take a superjet there and serve him papers? At this point, I feel like Seeley wants us to sympathize with this guy so badly that he’s just throwing random abuse at him to see what makes us care.
Where Monsters Lie #1: This Is Our Shit
Will: Finally, we come to Will’s Personal Freshest Chicken of the Week (Which May Not Be Ian’s Freshest Chicken of the Week). Admittedly, I am a Kyle Starks mark going back to … well, everything he’s ever written. His comedy always hits for me, and he can really fire off some one-liners. This high-concept book about a community of horror movie slasher killers coming together and dealing with problems (both mundane and of the serial killer variety) seems quite squarely in his wheelhouse.
Ian: No, this one totally hits for me. It took me about 10 or so pages before I realized it was a horror villain neighborhood, and it was such a pleasant, dawning revelation. I loved that neighborhood meeting scene (“Why do they hold the fair at all?”) and the pettiness of each character (as well as how many were surprisingly reasonable). It’s a solid premise, and I think Starks is doing a good job pushing right up against the line of “too meta.”
Will: I thought Piotr Kowalski’s art was strong, particularly in the inks and details. What’s comedy horror without the contorted facial expressions and the gore?
Ian: I thought Kowalski’s art was just fine. To be honest, I felt like the designs on all the horror villains were a little understated. I think I want them to be even more visually distinct, and even more ridiculous. Puzzleman’s mask, for example, just felt too plain. I think obviously you don’t want to be too ridiculous, or the reader will just check out completely, but I felt like a little more visual comedy would have served this issue well.
Will: Finally, I thought the cliffhanger in this first issue was a good one — how’s this neighborhood going to deal with the cops sniffing around? And I gotta think our detective is going to lose his mind when he gets a real sense of what’s going on in his backyard. For me, this is worth continuing to read.
Ian: This manages to avoid the trap of books with great premises, which is that they rarely have a great plot in the first issue. I like that we’ve got a really solid hook for the next issue, with plenty of foreshadowing about the upcoming state fair in the mix. What did Zel mean, for example, when she said two “shapes” in the same area? I feel like there might be some interesting lore about this whole occult murder business in the background, and I like that Starks didn’t just totally front-load his explanation and ruin the pacing of the book.
Does This Smell OK?
- Sound Effects Watch: In Rogues’ Gallery, there’s a wonderful “KICK” painted into the background that’s blurred with motion lines as she … kicks … someone.
- Rapid-fire questions:
- Of a celebrity currently alive, who do you think will be remembered the longest?
- Will: Tom Hanks. So many movies, so many genres.
- Ian: I’ll leave off political figures, just to keep this interesting. I feel like musicians are the one type of celebrity that have persisted for hundreds of years, so I’d guess someone like … Beyonce?
- What’s the worst reason to get kicked off your superhero team?
- Will: Taking a poo in the invisible jet.
- Ian: Forgetting to dump the waste tank in the Quinjet.
- Which slasher character would you least like to move into your neighborhood?
- Will: Freddy. I don’t sleep well now — Krueger wouldn’t make that problem any better.
- Ian: Ghostface. You just know he’d turn out to be one of my friends — they’re all susceptible to peer pressure.
- Of a celebrity currently alive, who do you think will be remembered the longest?
- Nearly one in three people forget about leftovers once they’re out of sight. I knew we were forgotten. ☹️
- There’s only one way to use leftover Champagne, and that’s in Jell-O. Duh.
- This list of five leftovers you can eat cold is mostly trash aside from the undisputed king of cold leftovers, pizza, and the understated No. 2: fried chicken.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
Ian Gregory is a writer and co-host of giant robots podcast Mech Ado About Nothing.
